ASUS targets the home with its new Vivo PC

ASUS is bringing back the good old Media Centre feeling in its new attempt to bring PCs to your living room; or pretty much trying to make a PC-equivalent of the Mac Mini. Called the Vivo PC and announced at Computex this year, it has been designed to be small and fits in with your home office and living room, being only 56mm thin and has a metal finish.

The Vivo PC runs Windows 8 and has external speakers with its SonicMaster technology and 802.11ac Wi-Fi support. There is no word on other hardware specs from what we can gather – including storage, RAM and processor. However, it has released a line of accessories around the Vivo PC. For instance, there is a brand new router – called the RT-AC68U – that is the first dual-band 802.11ac router with combined speeds of up to 1.9Gbit/s.

There is also the VivoMouse (above), which has been designed to combine a mouse, a touchpad and a wireless remote. It can be used as a standard optical mouse, but will be able to perform all of Windows 8’s multi-touch gestures on the large circular touchpad. And because it has been designed to be like a remote control, you can pretty much control your PC connected to your television with just one hand.

And despite the small dimensions of the Vivo PC, it can be expanded like any other PC. It features a sliding case cover that lets you modify the two internal memory slots, and the drive bay can accommodate either a 3.5-inch or 2.5-inch SATA 6Gbit/s hard drive.

ASUS says that the VivoMouse and the Vivo PC will be out in Q3. Where it will be released and its costs have not been disclosed.